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The Falling Man falls into place

The writing is going well, has been going strangely well for some months now. I feel a need to Get Things Done. A tightened up and revamped Cross Bound is ready to send out again, but it’s still over 12,000 words long and that’s too long for many magazines, which is especially frustrating when there are a couple of editors who want me to send them stories. Saying that, I do have a couple of older stories that are somewhat shorter. They were good ideas that didn’t quite flow, but with some re-writing they should be up to scratch.

Yesterday was a very good writing day. I wanted to get a real grip on The Falling Man, and when I put on Musick To Play In The Dark Vol 2 it put me in just the right place to get the atmosphere I want for the story – gothic and… altered, without being hammy, I suppose. And it’s important to convey the setting in all its majesty – I did spend a lot of my London life hanging around in cemeteries, even living opposite Kensal Green cemetery for several years, in what was once a stonemason’s workshop. The place was hideous, but the location couldn’t be faulted. I toured the crypt at Kensal Green more than once and would have loved to have done some photography there. Part of God’s Favourite Creatures (Kimota Anthology) is set there and the ‘babylands section’, full of tiny children’s coffins, features in The Fourth World/Heaven’s Cartographer, which was published in Psychotrope magazine many, many years ago.

Kensal Green Cemetery

As for the title of the new story, it comes from several sources. It was the title of a photograph of a man who jumped from the World Trade Centre. A man who had no choice but to descend into somewhere terrible, from somewhere terrible. It best describes the dilemma of the protagonist in my piece of fiction. Is that tasteless? Inappropriate? It’s not meant to be. I remember seeing the attacks online, the appalling plight of the people on the floors above the crash who had to jump or be burned alive. Symbolically, destroying the twin towers was incredibly powerful. But murder just isn’t.